During the second semester of my freshman year of college, I was not a very happy person. I wasn’t in the right environment and I didn’t really have very many friends. I had attempted to get involved and meet new people, but it really wasn’t working. It was during this very low time in my life, I decided to take up a new hobby: embroidering. When I started out, I really wasn’t very good. I was able to make some half decent stitches and create something that looked like an amateur had embroidered it. My first piece looked like this:

I really enjoyed embroidering. It helped get me through some very tough times because it was a hobby that really took up a lot of time and helped me be busy enough that I wouldn’t really think about not having people to spend time with.

Time passed, and along with other changes I transferred colleges and ended up in an environment that affected me very positively. During my first semester at my first college, I decided to open up an Etsy shop and sell custom embroidered items. At this point, my embroidery skills had gotten significantly better and I was able to create things like this:

And thus RebelBasedFashion was created. So far, it is still pretty much in its infancy, but I have experienced a lot of success. I think the best part of this entire business is the fact that I genuinely do enjoy embroidery and creating things, and now I can use that and apply it to a business. It has been a very exciting adventure and it’s amazing to think that something I originally used to ignore how lonely I was feeling was then able to become something that I could turn into something so much bigger.

I still embroider for myself from time to time, experimenting with new ideas and designs, and to this day it has not lost any of its ability to help me relax. So although I was in a bad place, I owe a lot to my experiences there because this wouldn’t be a reality without it.